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Nate Lowman, Escalade, 2005
Acrylic on canvas, Approx. 146,5 x 159 cm,
Astrup Fearnley Collection
Nate Lowman: The Natriot Act
Through January 3, 2010
Nate Lowman moves within the American art world, and consumer and media society more generally, continuously rearranging the visual signifiers he encounters. He gathers the raw materials for his art from the news, popular media and art history and reconditions them through his own reading, thoughts and feelings. Images of famous and ordinary people, including his own relatives, coexist in his art works, and create personal narratives of individuals and events. He then lets these narratives flow, allowing one signifier to slip to another, creating a multiplicity of possibilities and a rich, open-ended story. It’s an art of selecting, curating, orchestrating, manipulating. Nate Lowman's works mirror contemporary American society. In contrast to his predecessors, Lowman is first and foremost preoccupied with narratives and story-telling. Speaking in first person, he invokes real-life stories and offers his own opinion about the people and events within them. Fragments from the media and art historical references become equal constructional elements in his subjective narratives. As all narratives are related to time, notions of time and duration are invariably major elements within Lowman's work. The inclusion of imagery from different times and contexts in many of his works open up non-linear sequences of reading and invite viewers' to form an individual sense of temporality. Lowman typically initiates the story-telling with one or more signifiers. These may be signs, words or images and are often drawn from stories circulating in the media -- both recent news and out-of-date events. abandoned. The same images sometimes re-appear throughout different works creating junctions and synergies, and even a mysterious unity beyond the individual works. In Lowman’s vast mural-collages there is neither linearity nor any guide as how to read them, except for the hints provided by the titles. He does not allow a hierarchy of importance or for one single iconic image to dominate and center the viewer's attention. Instead it’s the interrelationship between the different images which allow Lowman's layered narrative structures to be left open to be completed by the viewer, not the artist. There is always a real space for the beholder.
An exhibition catalogue is available.
